Understanding the Problem
The Blackbaud Help Widget has long served as the primary source of in-product user assistance across all current Blackbaud solutions. Displayed as a green tab aligned to the top-level navigation bar, the widget expands into an elevated panel that overlays the current page. In addition to offering how-to documentation, it also provides access to weekly “What’s New” posts published by the Strategic Content Development team to inform users of new feature releases.
However, the Help Widget has proven difficult for the Strategic Content Development team to maintain, prompting a collaborative effort with the UX team to deprecate it across all solutions. As part of this initiative, a key challenge emerged: how to reimagine the in-product experience for “What’s New” content in a way that preserves its visibility and utility for users.
Project Goals
Based on insights from exploratory research and observed usability gaps in the current Application Status Page, I established design goals for the Application Status Page redesign which included the following:
Educate users about the hiring timeline and what to expect at each stage, reducing uncertainty and empowering them to make informed decisions about their job search.
Create a consistent, reliable destination where applicants can keep track of the progress of a given application and access all relevant notifications, assessments, and application materials—reducing reliance on scattered or ambiguous email updates.
Use visual design strategies to direct applicants to time-sensitive actions like required assessments.
Ideation and Design
To explore new possibilities for surfacing feature announcements within Blackbaud products, I began with a competitive analysis to identify common industry patterns for in-product updates. This helped establish a foundation of best practices and user expectations.
From there, I created several low-fidelity mockups to illustrate potential directions. These early concepts were reviewed with the Strategic Content Development team to ensure alignment with their goals and constraints. Their feedback helped refine the strongest ideas into high-level prototypes, which I then tested in discovery sessions with users.
Two primary design directions emerged from this process:
Modal View
In this concept, selecting the “What’s New” item from the omnibar help menu would launch a full-page modal window showcasing the latest feature announcements. I explored several layout variations, including a paginated format and an expandable repeater view, to accommodate different content structures and reading behaviors.
Flyout View
This version preserved the interaction pattern familiar from the current Help Widget, using a right-aligned flyout panel. By leveraging the SKY UX flyout component, this approach balanced user familiarity with technical efficiency. The design also offered improved readability and space, addressing a common pain point in the existing experience.
Discovery
The primary goal of the discovery phase was to understand how users currently engage with Blackbaud’s “What’s New” posts and how these announcements fit into their mental model of the overall product experience. Additionally, I aimed to gather user feedback on several early concepts for how new feature announcements might be delivered after the planned deprecation of the Help Widget.
To guide this exploration, I developed a semi-structured interview guide with 11 open-ended questions. These questions focused on how users typically learn about new features in Blackbaud products, what they find effective or frustrating in the current experience, and how well the Help Widget supports their needs. After each interview, I walked participants through interactive prototypes of potential new approaches to in-product announcements to gather qualitative feedback on usability and perceived value.
Interviews were conducted with nine participants from various nonprofit organizations who use Raiser’s Edge NXT, Financial Edge NXT, Education Management, and Church Management products. Each session lasted approximately one hour and provided rich insights into user behaviors, preferences, and unmet needs regarding feature updates.
User quotes
“It's just much better than what we have now. Much cleaner and doesn't look like it's from the late 90s or early 2000s.”
“I think it will be satisfactory as far as if I was coming in to check and see the status of my application. I think I would understand what was needed and where it was going.”
“I would definitely get used to this and find it informative. I can't think of anything that it doesn't provide that I'd still need to find somewhere else.”
Personas and Journey Maps
Based on the user interviews, we identified a clear difference in how horizontally-structured organizations manage new feature announcements compared to vertically-structured organizations.
With these two organizational profiles in mind, I crafted two user personas, one within a horizontally-structured organization and one within a vertically-structured organization. I also created user journey maps to illustrate how each persona interacts with the current What’s New system for new feature announcements and the opportunities for us to improve the experience within each user journey.
Horizontal organizations
Horizontally-structured organizations provide each user with complete ownership of their domain and workflow. As such, each user is responsible for staying up to date with the latest changes in the product that affect their workflow and knowledge-sharing of new features within the organization is typically an informal practice.
Vertical organizations
Vertically-structured organizations typically have standard operating procedures for how tasks are completed that are determined by organizational leadership. These organizations will typically have a designated person on staff to evaluate new features and determine organizational adoption. This leads to a practice of knowledge-sharing where most users will largely ignore any in-product new feature announcements and will instead wait for the designated person at their organization to share information on valuable new features or changes in standard operating procedures.
Revisions
With the feedback from the user discovery sessions and a better understanding of the user journey in hand, I made revisions to the designs to support a multi-faceted help strategy for how users will access the What’s New content following the deprecation of the help widget.
Trigger
Rather than automatically opening the What’s New notification when the user logs into the product, a red indicator is attached to the help menu in the top-level navigation bar when there is new update information to view. The red indicator communicates a system change similarly to the notification menu that sits to its left and helps the user learn where What’s New information lives within the product if they want to return to the information at a later time.
In-Product Modal
The revised modal window shows an expandable repeater view of the most recent features to be introduced to the product. Users can easily scan the headlines to find information that is most relevant to their own workflow. Additional links are provided at the bottom of the window for more information via the product’s external help center site.
External Help Center
Each Blackbaud product has its own external help center site where new feature documentation is maintained. The external help center provides users with a dedicated area to seek out relevant information as well as a unique page URL to share information with others.
Outcome
Unfortunately, this project was deprioritized due to a lack of resources needed to proceed with the deprecation of the help widget. If the project were to continue, the next steps I would take would be to conduct usability testing with the new experience to further evaluate discoverability and comprehension of the What’s New content. I would also want to further explore the responsive experience of how new feature announcements appear across multiple platforms.